I can't ignore this anymore, I need help. No, it's not drug or alcohol related, it's rather my chess.

I'm keeping my rating between 1600 and 1700 on chesscube, which I'm quite fine with at the moment. I consider myself pretty strong at tactics and endgames, much weaker in openings though. Now to the problem - I'm hanging pieces. No, really. I'm hanging them every game. I'm not loosing them through tactical blunders, I simply overlook my own hanging piece!

I can out-tactic most of my opponents, but after a move or two I leave my rook hanging and there goes the game. I'm spotting mates in 2, even 3 relatively easily, I'm good at spotting general tactic patterns (for my rating), but what good is all this when I'm loosing 95% of my games due to simply overlooking a piece, even a queen here and there.

So, any advices how to go about solving this? It's driving me nuts - not because I'm loosing games, but because I'm loosing in such a stupid way games which (in most cases) I've already gained advantage in. And - I've already tried nailing "check all own pieces when on the move" into my head and (obviously) failed.

I may not be the one to talk how not to hang pieces since I hang pieces quite a lot but I found useful playing a lot of bullet games just to enter in piece hanging fast play. I have found that after that I play quite stronger than I used to play at long games, just by improving at fast games 1 min or 2 min should do it, I would say 2 min at yahoo and 1 min at chesscube will help you hanging less pieces.

I suppose it is all about practice, you may find that you lose a lot of games by time but if you try to play fast instead of over thinking a move eventually you will get stronger at longer games since you will tend to look into whole boards more fastly than to just overlook some moves.

I hope it helps you a bit, although it may go against all that any other chess-player would say, such as 1 min or 2 min games are not chess and so on.

Hey, that's a fantastic suggestion. I've never really liked bullet chess and I don't play games shorter than 15 minutes. At least up to now I didn't. So yeah, I'll try blitz and bullet, thanks a lot, sounds like you nailed it perfectly .